On The Web's 25th Anniversary, Berners-Lee Calls For A Bill of Rights For Online Users

from the prising-the-keyboards-from-our-cold,-dead-fingers dept

Exactly 25 years ago, a British engineer working at the European nuclear research center CERN wrote a paper entitled "Information Management: A Proposal." It had a very specific purpose:

This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system.

Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution -- a bill of rights."

As we reported last year, Berners-Lee has been outspoken in his criticism of the US and UK governments for their unjustified and disproportionate spying activities, something he is still concerned about:

In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed.

So it's no surprise that at the heart of his new initiative lies an attempt to protect some of the areas that have been harmed by massive surveillance programs and online business models based on gathering and exploiting users' personal data:

Principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity would be explored in the Magna Carta scheme. "These issues have crept up on us," Berners-Lee said. "Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years."

Re:

How about "no support for DRM" as one of the rights?

DRM prevents certain data from being displayed without the use of proprietary decoders. With DRM, you can have a fully HTML compliant browser that won't be able to display much of the content made for HTML compliant browsers. This is the opposite of what open standards should be.

It's interesting that he used the phrase "cold, dead fingers" - something that's become somewhat of a trademark among the 2nd-Amendment crowd. Lets hope that this proposed Internet "Bill of Rights" doesn't end up like the Second Amendment, which more and more only exists on paper.

We

If there is one general concept I have taken from my two years of reading Tech Dirt, it is that semantics rule the political domain. The absence of or addition of a few extra words can change a statement entirely.

Going with this concept, I really dislike the usage of "responsible anonymity." Anonymous is anonymous or it is not. If there is a way to weed out and uncover irresponsible anons, then there really is no anonymity to begin with.

And you can sure bet that the MAFIAA will do everything to get their puppets that is the US government to have copyright mentioned everywhere in it with copyright extionsions and copyright enforcements and punisments of said copyrights written every other line with mentioning to their puppets that there will be no forthcoming election funding or any other funding of any sort given to the US government if they don't get these implementions written and stamped all over this new web charter.

there's about as much chance of an 'online Magna Carter' as there is of Hollywood and the Entertainment industries growing a pair and joining everyone else in the digital; age, giving the service that all customers crave for!!

Not sure this matters much...

The US government doesn't respect the Bill of Rights it already has so why would they respect one for the Internet? And if the US government isn't going to respect it, why should any other government? Laws are only as good as the governments that respect and uphold them. Otherwise they are just words on a piece of paper.